In All the Littlest Ways
by want your rad bromance
Summary: It started with her watching him, and it ended that way, too. Perhaps she should have realized sooner that she preferred ersatz enigmatic eyes to ones that only told lies. :Shuuhei/Momo; could be slightly AU:


A/N: FINALLY, I'm back! xD I've recently come to adore this pairing, but there are virtually no fanworks for it... D: So I suppose I'll have to change that~ It's open to interpretation whether Shuuhei survives Allon's attack or not- I got the inspiration for this from an AMV where he's killed. First time writing either of them, so still a bit sketchy on it...

* * *

It started with her watching him.

Momo had always been a girl keenly aware of her body's condition, almost to the point of a 'sixth sense'. Things came, went, and stayed, bouncing off her field of awareness, slipping into it, or making themselves very much known. She felt him cry out before she turned to see it- this senpai she barely knew, one eye now sinking into a bloody river. Her two functional eyes watched his one watch the empty eyes of the Hollows, groaning and jostling for a bite at the young Shinigami. It was the eyes that made her move in the end, and the worried cries of her classmates could not reel her back in. Instead, she pulled them forward, and she did not have to look away from the edge of her blade to feel them next to her- Kira-kun to her left and Abarai-kun to her right, both tall and resolute. She felt their senpai behind her just as sharply, and in the space of time which it took for him to ask them-_her_- what they were doing, she wondered if he felt her there too.

Shuuhei had spoken maybe once or twice to the girl since the incident with the training excersize- he'd graduated not long after, and she'd only been a first-year. Seeing her on a bench, hunched over something that appeared to be a stack of papers fighting a losing battle against the autumn wind, he realized that she would have been out of the Academy now for quite a while. A few of the papers escaped her grasp at last, snapping like flags in the wind, pushed along haphazardly between ground and air. Being much taller than the girl, he caught one with ease and smoothed it out, ready to return it to her. Seeing what was on it, though, he gave pause. Granted, it took him a moment for the age differences to translate, but he recognized it as a sketch of one of the girl's friends, the quiet one with blue eyes. The likeness was striking, from the oddly-shaped hair to the almost apologetic smile. She'd since finished collecting all her other wayward papers, and he could see now from corners that they were all sketches of various denizens of the Seiretei. The girl glanced up at him, face sheepish and cheeks tinged red from more than just the harsh sting of the wind. He asked her if she'd drawn the picture, and she replied that it was just a hobby, something to pass the time and prevent her from blowing up her apartment trying to train with Kidou on rainy days. Obviously much to her surprise, he got a laugh out of her answer, and the next edition of the Seiretei's newspaper featured her artwork. Walking away that day, he was keenly aware of her eyes on his retreating back, and wondered if perhaps he had grown far too accustomed to being unseen from behind Tousen-taichou's visor.

Momo did not have good fortune when it came to attacks at her stomach. She knew she must have been rocketing through the air, but time seemed frozen, so slow that she could watch every little drop of blood gleam in the sunlight like Aizen-taichou's glasses- she had always loved those glasses. The phantom of his blade dug in a little deeper, and her teeth gritted, slippery slick from the blood leaking through the cracks. Her hands trailed in front of her uselessly, fingers still unable to grip the specter and pull it that last stretch out, to banish his grip on her forever. Even her reaction to being caught by Kira-kun's Kidou was delayed, and she still found her fingers feebly curling in on themselves like burning paper, trying to make fists, trying to fight in all the littlest ways. Momo felt his presence just as acutely as if all her years in the Academy, all her work as a Shinigami, had melted away, leaving only a girl with an unnamed sword so easily provoked by enigmatic eyes. This time, his voice was not full of shock- but was the rescuer ever supposed to falter?

It ended with her watching him, too.


End file.
